Ancient Chinese poems are much harder to understand than modern Chinese poems! There are a lot of reasons behind it. I will list them in a separate posts#save the space for the link#. I've been learning ancient Chinese poems since more than 10 years ago. Below are some tips that you can use if you are interested in learning some ancient Chinese poems but find them too hard to understand!
1) Start with some easier poems
Ancient Chinese poems can be separated by how difficult they are to understand. There are some poems that even professionals would find hard to understand, but there are some poems that we've been learning since very young.
As a beginner, it might be hard to tell which poems would be hard and which would be easy. The same poet could write something really easy and really hard, like Li Bai. His JingYeSi is very popular and easy to understand, but his XingLuNan is much harder!
However, there are still some tips that you can use to find some easy poems to start with:
- Try short poems! Short poems have fewer words, so the chance to encounter special word will be lower! The format of the easiest poem is like:
A short title
XXXXX, XXXXX.XXXXX, XXXXX.
Four sentences with 5 characters in each sentence!
- Try famous poets! Famous poets could write something really hard to understand, but they usually wrote some easy and famous poems! Below are some poets that you can try first:
Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi
- Try poets living in peaceful times! Poets usually have much more emotions to write about when they were living through the wars, or they've been experiencing something unfair. Therefore, it will be safe to try the poems written during peaceful times. The periods I recommend are:
Early Tang Dynasty, Middle Tang Dynasty, Early Song Dynasty
- Try easy themes! There are a lot of themes that ancient poets like to write about! Some themes are always related to harder poems, for example, war, homesick or dying of a dynasty. Some themes are more often seen in easy poems:
- Nature: flowers, trees, rivers, moonlight, grass
- Seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter
During the first two to three years of me learning ancient Chinese poetry, I was only reading easy poems with as few characters as possible. In this way, I learned a lot of special words and expressions without too much efforts! Hope this method will work for you as well!
I will make a page separating the easy poems from the hard ones that I've shared! #save the space for the link#
Feel free to let me know in the comment if you find these tips useful!
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